A few weeks ago I was asked if I would be willing to take part in some research into improving the process of transplantation. Anything that helps Rosy “Superfly” Edwards (it will catch on, I just need to be patient) get hold of a moist and throbbing kidney sooner rather than later is an opportunity to be seized, so I said an emphatic yes, and if some other people also benefited in the process then yeah, that’s fine too, whatever.
I was told during my dialysis session that a research nurse called Sam would be coming to see me. Sam is a stand up name and hints at solidity: it is the sobriquet of my younger brother for one, and I’ve slept with a couple of Sams without much ado. Perhaps the fact this Sam was a nurse, and a man, and a nurse of research should have rung alarm bells, but nothing could have prepared me for the fact I was about to encounter the most awkward human being I have come across in my life, ever.
For a start, he crept. In my experience, most people navigate between point A and point B by walking: one foot follows another, steady pace, slight arm swing. Like most, I’ve come across the odd saunter, and my grandparents have by now earned the right to shuffle, but creepers are a bizarre and unusual sub-sect who have surely only developed their lightness of foot in order to conceal, or perhaps add to, their general oddity.
So he crept up, asked awkwardly whether I would…y’know, would it be ok to sit down? And after gingerly pulling up a chair and seating himself, he began to speak: quietly, haltingly and with absolutely no facial expression whatsoever. He could have just have easily been telling me about his dolphin fetish than explaining the purpose of the proposed research for all the difference it made to his visage. The tone of his voice was equally static, neither rising nor falling in pitch or volume, and he employed it in asking me lots of obtuse questions.
I could overlook the irregular eye contact that alternated between ferocious intensity and non-existent, or even the bafflingly comic design he had applied to his side-burns, but I could not tolerate the silence. This guy would say something and then…stop. My own questions dropped into a void, met with vast nothingness. When he did speak, he repeated himself, or spoke of the utterly banal and irrelevant. He had come to ask whether I would be prepared to fill out a questionnaire, a task that would last three minutes and act profoundly in my own interest, and yet, incredibly, it took him ten minutes to stammer out the question. Ten minutes of painful, tense absurdity that was ten minutes less of Sherlock (I’m catching up on the first series) and ten minutes that has for now and forever alluded me.
I should be clear that I do not believe Research Nurse Sam sits (gingerly) anywhere on the Autistic spectrum, as my description of him might suggest; I work everyday with a range of children with varying degrees of Autism and Aspergers, and I know it when I see it. Honest to goodness, this guy was just balls-out, serial killer weird, and when my nurse mentioned to me that he was popping by again during Thursday’s session, my heart dropped into my high-tops. Perhaps, I hoped, he had just been having a bad day the last time we met…but no, he was just as bone-crunchingly awkward as ever. Just before he left, he said, “When I read your info, I couldn’t help but notice…” and I froze in a catatonic fear of what might follow, “…that we share the same GP.” Silence.
“Oh, right…” I replied.
“It’s a good GP,” he informed me (incorrectly – its not). Then he sort of nodded, and crept away. Which just goes to show: it’s not just us patients who are one kidney short of a transplant.
I was told during my dialysis session that a research nurse called Sam would be coming to see me. Sam is a stand up name and hints at solidity: it is the sobriquet of my younger brother for one, and I’ve slept with a couple of Sams without much ado. Perhaps the fact this Sam was a nurse, and a man, and a nurse of research should have rung alarm bells, but nothing could have prepared me for the fact I was about to encounter the most awkward human being I have come across in my life, ever.
For a start, he crept. In my experience, most people navigate between point A and point B by walking: one foot follows another, steady pace, slight arm swing. Like most, I’ve come across the odd saunter, and my grandparents have by now earned the right to shuffle, but creepers are a bizarre and unusual sub-sect who have surely only developed their lightness of foot in order to conceal, or perhaps add to, their general oddity.
So he crept up, asked awkwardly whether I would…y’know, would it be ok to sit down? And after gingerly pulling up a chair and seating himself, he began to speak: quietly, haltingly and with absolutely no facial expression whatsoever. He could have just have easily been telling me about his dolphin fetish than explaining the purpose of the proposed research for all the difference it made to his visage. The tone of his voice was equally static, neither rising nor falling in pitch or volume, and he employed it in asking me lots of obtuse questions.
I could overlook the irregular eye contact that alternated between ferocious intensity and non-existent, or even the bafflingly comic design he had applied to his side-burns, but I could not tolerate the silence. This guy would say something and then…stop. My own questions dropped into a void, met with vast nothingness. When he did speak, he repeated himself, or spoke of the utterly banal and irrelevant. He had come to ask whether I would be prepared to fill out a questionnaire, a task that would last three minutes and act profoundly in my own interest, and yet, incredibly, it took him ten minutes to stammer out the question. Ten minutes of painful, tense absurdity that was ten minutes less of Sherlock (I’m catching up on the first series) and ten minutes that has for now and forever alluded me.
I should be clear that I do not believe Research Nurse Sam sits (gingerly) anywhere on the Autistic spectrum, as my description of him might suggest; I work everyday with a range of children with varying degrees of Autism and Aspergers, and I know it when I see it. Honest to goodness, this guy was just balls-out, serial killer weird, and when my nurse mentioned to me that he was popping by again during Thursday’s session, my heart dropped into my high-tops. Perhaps, I hoped, he had just been having a bad day the last time we met…but no, he was just as bone-crunchingly awkward as ever. Just before he left, he said, “When I read your info, I couldn’t help but notice…” and I froze in a catatonic fear of what might follow, “…that we share the same GP.” Silence.
“Oh, right…” I replied.
“It’s a good GP,” he informed me (incorrectly – its not). Then he sort of nodded, and crept away. Which just goes to show: it’s not just us patients who are one kidney short of a transplant.
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